IronCAD Installation Problems

[Chris Lohman]

I occasionally encounter users who find that IronCAD crashes constantly for them. I can assure you that we don't intentionally release a flaky product. I sometimes find someone though that just can not get the install to stabilize. Following are some tips that I have gathered regarding this:

 

The number one cause of a flaky IronCAD is a bad installation. Unfortunately when an install goes bad no messages appear so you dont know it. Most often simply re-installing IronCAD doesnt work because its not IronCAD thats the cause of the problem, its a running application that interferes. If you find yourself in this situation, here are the steps that I recommend.

 

==Uninstall and Prep for Install==

1 Backup all of your data. Insure you also backup any custom templates or catalogs or anything in the IronCAD Program Files folder.

2 Uninstall IronCAD. Select No To All when asked to remove shared files. After the uninstall finishes, do not reboot.

3 Delete the folder that IronCAD was installed in. Just completely blow it away. By default the files Im referring to are in c:\Program Files\IronCAD. If you once used older versions of IronCAD then you may also have a c:\Program Files\Alventive or c:\Program Files\VDS. Delete those also.

4 Clean out the registry. (Newbie Warning: Deleting the wrong thing in your registry could render your entire operating system useless and create a myriad of other problems, so be very cautious) Open up a registry editor (Start/Run/type in regedit sans quotes, hit enter) and delete HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\IronCAD . You may also find old registry entries from previous revs in here as well. Delete anything under software named IronCAD, IronCAD, LLC. ,Alventive, and VDS. Also delete the same folders under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\ .

5 This step is the key to insuring the install will work the next time. In short, you have to prevent all applications from starting automatically when you boot/login.

 

First, you need to insure that there is nothing under the [start/Programs/Startup] program group. Any program groups under Start/Programs are actually just shortcuts in a folder on your hard drive, so you can work with them as if they were files. To find them, Right Click on the [start] menu (Right click, not left) and select Explore (not explore all users). This will take you into a folder that is named your profile. Under your profile, browse into the folders Start Menu/Programs/Startup. The folder Startup is a system folder so you cannot move it. What we need to do is move everything under the startup folder up to the C drive. Its often not enough to just move it to your desktop or basically anywhere under the system folder. It must be moved completely up to the system root, which by default is the C drive. (The startup folder is where you place shortcuts to applications that you want to start automatically when the system logs in)

 

The next place to look for applications starting automatically is back in the registry. Fire up regedit again and browse into HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version . Under Current Version there will be a few folders named run. In these folders is where other applications can startup automatically. Lets first make a backup of these folders. Select one of the run folders, go up to the File pull down menu and select Export. Export this backup to some place safe. This will create a filename that ends with a .reg extension that will allow you to easily restore once IronCAD is installed. Repeat the backup process for all of the run folders. (YOU COULD DESTROY YOUR SYSTEM NOTICE: Take extra caution in the next step, deleting the wrong thing could cause a world of hurt) After you have backed up these folders, delete anything in them that sounds like a known application. Be careful and choose NOT to delete if you are uncertain. There are things that you want to keep like, systray and clock. Only delete those that are obviously applications that you are familiar with like something with